by Ian Mortimer
As noted above, many medieval clocks were astronomical. Calculating time exactly was essential for the accurate observation of the Sun, Moon and stars. We might not set much store by astrology in the twenty-first century but before 1600 a great deal of medical, geographical and scientific work depended on a precise knowledge of the movement of the heavens, and clocks significantly professionalised these lines of work. It goes without saying that the standardisation of the hour was crucial for scientific experimentation. Clocks also calibrated the social and economic use of time. People could meet at a particular hour; and set periods could be established for working times and opening hours. They could plan their working lives more efficiently. For these reasons, the mechanical clock deserves to be recognised as one of the great inventions of the Middle Ages, and its spread in the fifteenth century was one of the most important changes of the age.
There is another, more subtle respect in which the spread of clocks marks a significant shift. This is the secularisation of time. In the Middle Ages, time was dominated by the Church. The world only existed because God had created it, and time only existed because God had created the movement of things within Creation. Time was therefore a part of Creation: it filled divine space. Alongside this theological concept of time, there was another, more practical one. The yearly cycle was seen as part of a divine architecture in which God had ordained a time for sowing, a time for harvesting, a time for grazing flocks, and so on. Within this divine year, certain days were set aside for fasting – in Advent and Lent – and others for feasting. Some days were venerated as saints’ days. Within every day of the year, particular hours were designated for divine services, such as Prime, Nones, Compline and Matins. Time was not just a sacred thing itself; its subdivisions too had spiritual significance. On a day-to-day basis, the Church controlled the perception of time through the ringing of church bells – marking the hour in towns, calling the religious to prayer, announcing the passing of the dead, and so on.
For all these reasons, time was not just time as we know it: it was a gift from God. Hence the medieval Church would not allow Christians to charge interest on sums of money they loaned to others: to do so was to charge money for time, which belonged to God, and no Christian had the right to sell what was God’s. However, as time increasingly became subject to the measurement of man-made machines, it lost some of its semi-magical religious associations. It seemed to be under human control – a thing that clockmakers tamed, not an unfettered part of Creation. Most significantly, the man-made machine came to dictate to the Church when it should ring its bells and hold its religious services. While units of distance, weight and volume all still varied from place to place, the hour became the first internationally standardised unit of measurement, taking priority over both local customs and ecclesiastical authority.
Individualism
Polished metal and obsidian mirrors have existed from ancient times, and because of this, historians have usually passed over the introduction of the glass mirror as if it was just another variation on an old theme. But the development of glass mirrors marks a crucial shift, for they allowed people to see themselves properly for the first time, with all their unique expressions and characteristics. Polished metal mirrors of copper or bronze were very inefficient by comparison, reflecting only about 20 per cent of the light; and even silver mirrors had to be exceptionally smooth to give any meaningful reflection. These were also prohibitively expensive: most medieval people would only have glimpsed their faces darkly, reflected in a pool of water.
The convex glass mirror was a Venetian invention of about 1300, possibly connected with the development of the glass lenses used in the earliest spectacles (invented in the 1280s). By the late fourteenth century, you could find such mirrors in northern Europe. The future Henry IV of England paid 6d to have the glass of a broken mirror replaced in 1387.9 Four years later, while travelling in Prussia, he paid £1 3s. 8d in sterling for ‘two mirrors of Paris’ for his own use.10 His son, Henry V, had three mirrors in his chamber at the time of his death in 1422, two of which were together worth £1 3s. 2d.11 Although these were still far too expensive for an average farmer or tradesman, in 1500 the prosperous city merchant could afford such an item. In this respect, the individual with disposable income differed greatly from his ancestor in 1400: he could see his own reflection and thus knew how he appeared to the rest of the world.
People’s ability to appreciate their unique appearance led to a huge rise in the number of portraits commissioned, especially in the Low Countries and Italy. While almost all the oil paintings that survive from the fourteenth century are of a religious nature, the few exceptions are portraits. This trend towards portraiture grew in the fifteenth century, and came to dominate non-religious art. As important men increasingly commissioned artists to create their likenesses, the more those likenesses were viewed, encouraging other people to have their portraits painted. Portraits invited the viewer to ‘Look at me!’ and implied that the sitter was a man of substance, or a well-connected woman, worth portraying because of his or her status. They encouraged you to talk about these people, making them the centre of attention.
One of the most famous paintings of the century is Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage, painted in Bruges in about 1434. It shows a convex round mirror on the back wall, reflecting the backs of the subjects to the artist. If van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man with a Turban, painted the previous year, is of the artist himself (as it probably is), then he also had a flat mirror by this date. We know from Brunelleschi’s famous experiment on perspective (to which we will return shortly) that flat mirrors were available in Florence at that time. After van Eyck, self-portraits abound for the later fifteenth century in Italy as well as the Netherlands. Dürer painted quite a few, culminating in the image of himself as Christ at the age of 28 (1500); his introspection rivals that of Rembrandt in the seventeenth century. In such an artist’s hands, the mirror became an instrument whereby a man could start to investigate how other people saw him. Hitherto artists had only portrayed other people; now they could put themselves into the picture. And anyone who saw the intense interrogation by the artist of his own face, searching for the clues to his nature, could not help but pause for thought about his or her own identity.
All this amounts to far more than just a series of attractive pictures. The very act of a person seeing himself in a mirror or being represented in a portrait as the centre of attention encouraged him to think of himself in a different way. He began to see himself as unique. Previously the parameters of individual identity had been limited to an individual’s interaction with the people around him and the religious insights he had over the course of his life. Thus individuality as we understand it today did not exist: people only understood their identity in relation to groups – their household, their manor, their town or parish – and in relation to God. Occasionally individuals stood out from the crowd in the way they wrote about themselves – you only need to think of Peter Abelard’s autobiographical Historia Calamitatum and Ulrich von Lichenstein’s starring role in his own romances – but the average person saw himself only as part of a community. This is why the medieval punishments of banishment and exile were so severe. A tradesman thrown out of his home town would lose everything that gave him his identity. He would be unable to make a living, borrow money or trade goods. He would lose the trust of those who could stand up for him and protect him physically, socially and economically. He would have no one to plead his innocence or previous good behaviour in court, and he would lose the spiritual protection of any church guild or fraternity to which he belonged. What happened in the fifteenth century was not so much that this community identity broke down, but rather that people started to become aware of their unique qualities irrespective of their loyalty to their community. That old sense of collective identity was overlaid with a new sense of personal self-worth.
This new individualism had a religious dimension, too. Medieval autobiographical writing is no
t normally about the author himself, but about his relationship with God. Similarly, the hagiographies of early-medieval saints are archetypal moral stories of men and women who followed God’s path. Even in the fourteenth century, a monk writing the chronicle of his monastery or a citizen writing about his town would incorporate God into his narrative, as the important element of the story was not the community itself so much as its relationship to God. As the fourteenth century drew to a close and people started to see themselves as individual members of their communities, they started to emphasise their personal relationships with God. You can see that transformation reflected in religious patronage. If in 1340 a wealthy man built a chantry chapel to sing Masses for his soul, he would have the interior decorated with religious paintings, such as the adoration of the Magi. By 1400, if the founder’s descendant redecorated that chapel, he would have himself painted as one of the Magi. By the late fifteenth century, more often than not, just the patron’s portrait would be on display, the emblems of faith that the artist included in the painting being sufficient representation of the religiosity the patron wished to project.
The new individualism also extended to the way people expressed themselves. The letters they wrote to one another were increasingly of a personal nature; previously letter-writers had restricted themselves to formalities and orders. There was now a marked trend towards writing about yourself and revealing your personal thoughts and feelings. Examples of such autobiographical writing abound in the fifteenth century: in English there is The Book of Margery Kempe; in Castilian, Las Memorias de Leonora López de Córdoba; and in Italian, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s I Commentarii. Four of the earliest collections of English private letters – the Stonor, Plumpton, Paston and Cely letters – also date from the fifteenth century. Ordinary people started noting down the times and dates of their births, so they could use astrology to find out more about themselves in terms of their health and fortune. The new self-awareness also led to a greater desire for privacy. In previous centuries, householders and their families had shared a dwelling entirely, often eating and sleeping in the same hall as their servants. Now they began to build private chambers for themselves and their guests, away from the hall. As with so many changes in history, people were largely unaware of the significance of what they were doing. Nevertheless, our vision of ourselves as individuals, not just members of a community, marks an important shift from the medieval world to the modern.
Realism and Renaissance naturalism
In some ways, realism is connected to the rise of individualism. Both incorporate new approaches to people in relation to their surroundings. Both emphasise an interest in humanity independent of mankind’s relationship with God. But whereas individualism may be expressed in terms of a person’s self-understanding and self-worth through reflection, realism is best understood in terms of scholars and artists holding up a mirror to the whole of Creation, in order to explain the world and everything in it in all its complexity.
You only have to look at the naturalism of Renaissance art to see signs of the new thinking. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s sculptures on the Baptistry doors in Florence, created in 1401–22, were a marvel on account of their verisimilitude and daring use of perspective. Brunelleschi’s famous optical experiment, performed about 1420, took things a stage further. Using a large flat mirror with a hole in it, he held up his own painting of the Baptistry (also with a hole in it) to face the actual building. By viewing the real building through the two holes and comparing it to the reflected image of his own painting, he was able to ascertain the geometric laws that govern perspective, thus vastly improving on the first attempts at linear representation by Giotto a century earlier. From the second quarter of the fifteenth century, Florentine painters did not need to estimate how to represent buildings; they could apply systematic rules to make sure they appeared ‘realistic’ to the onlooker. At the same time, realism crept into religious art. Northern European artists such as Robert Campin and Roger de Weyden began to paint large-scale, highly ostentatious religious scenes in which the characters’ heads were no longer surrounded by haloes. Italian artists such as Ghirlandaio and Leonardo similarly dropped the halo; others reduced it to a thin, almost invisible ring of light. These artistic changes may seem slight but they reflect a shift in priorities – from the symbolic representation of men and women to portraying them as they would actually have appeared.
Naturalistic representations came even more into focus in the matter of the nude. In the Middle Ages, depictions of nakedness seem to have lacked the erotic content they acquired in the Renaissance. The naked or semi-naked Christ on the cross was vulnerable; he was not an erotic figure. Naked buffoons blowing trumpets from their bottoms, depicted in the margins of psalters, were not included to stimulate the sexual appetites of educated readers; they were there to mock the pride of mankind, or to amuse the reader. Portrayals of Adam and Eve similarly emphasised their nakedness as shameful, not erotic. In the fifteenth century, however, the nude – the erotic unclothed figure – emerged. In the 1440s, Donatello portrayed the Old Testament figure of David as naked but for a hat and boots, allowing open inspection of the body in a way that contrasts strongly with the discreet figures from earlier sculpture and painting, which had no sensual or corporeal presence. Moreover, Donatello’s work is a free-standing sculpture, unsupported by a niche or any other architectural device: it is proud and defiant in its nudity. It harks back to the Venuses of the ancient world, demonstrating not only that Donatello could rival any classical sculptor in his skill, but also that a man in his natural state, as God made him, was a suitable subject for the attention and admiration of the public.
By the end of the century, the male nude had become commonplace, appearing in everything from Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man drawing to Michelangelo’s David (1504). Female nudes, although rarer, first appeared in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1484), Hans Memling’s Eve (1485–90), one of Michelangelo’s drawings for The Entombment (1500), and Giorgione’s seductive Sleeping Venus (1508). In the early sixteenth century, in the hands of Giovanni Bellini and Titian, the erotic female nude became an established art form in its own right. On top of the physical nakedness, painters and sculptors also began to depict Man’s emotional nakedness in more explicit ways than before, as can be seen in Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–9) or his Rebellious Slave (1513). Mankind was no longer depicted just as the humble recipient of God’s mercy or wrath, but became a subject suitable for serious study in its own right.
Renaissance humanism also promoted the study of Man’s inner life through providing classical models of education. The waning of the influence of Latin in the previous century and the rise of university courses that prepared young scholars for nothing but their allotted roles in academic life – teaching grammar, studying theology, and practising medicine or the law – led to a reaction among those who knew and appreciated the educational standards of the ancient world. The old university Trivium came to be replaced by the studia humanitatis, in which logic no longer played a part but history, ethics and poetry joined grammar and rhetoric as the key components of a good education. Greek too was revived as a means of unlocking the wisdom of the classical world. The Platonic Academy became the model for a new educational establishment in Florence, founded by Cosimo de Medici in the 1440s, with the humanist Marsilio Ficino as its head. Further impetus to the study of Greek came in 1453 after the fall of Constantinople, when many Greek-speaking scholars from the city arrived in Italy. Most importantly, the lack of distinction between arts and science in the studia humanitatis meant that it provided an open education, broadening horizons rather than limiting them by enforcing dogmatic obedience to ancient texts. Thus it built on the key virtue of medieval enquiry: to observe natural phenomena as aspects of God’s Creation – in which everything is possible but everything happens for a reason – and to explain these phenomena accordingly.
You may wonder if this new realism and naturalism really deserves to be considered a major chan
ge. Is it not merely replacing one method of representing the world with another? And as for the ‘inner realism’ with which Renaissance humanists were concerned: was this not just a shift in educational priorities? After all, even understanding things in great depth does not necessarily have profound consequences. Consider Leonardo da Vinci, who is often said to be the ultimate Renaissance man and one of the greatest minds the West has ever produced. It is fair to say that within the parameters of this book, he was almost entirely inconsequential. Fifteenth-century peasants experimenting with horse-drawn ploughs had a greater impact on European life than Leonardo. His genius remained largely hidden, coalescing in the pages of his notebooks, which would amuse and amaze people in later centuries. Most of his paintings did not last, due to his fascination with new, untried and untested compounds of paint, many of which degraded. But what Leonardo represents, on the other hand, is of supreme importance. Although he did not have a university education he was able to turn his mind to a wide range of subjects, from how muscles work to how a bird flies. And while the fifteenth century saw just one Leonardo da Vinci, it also saw several hundred people of lesser genius but equal curiosity who were prepared to investigate the reality that surrounded them. That a few of them pursued experimentation into seemingly bizarre areas of enquiry, including numerology, astrological prognostication, angelology and dream interpretation, is also important. The reason why these things appear unscientific to us now is because the curious minds of the Renaissance eventually concluded that they were scientific dead ends. Thus fifteenth-century attempts to discover and portray the nature of reality are comparable to voyages to the New World: both permitted discoveries by breaking down previous assumptions and investigating the unknown, whether that be the far side of the ocean or the movement of a bird’s wing in flight. To put it in a nutshell, the fifteenth century was when people in the West stopped their collective study of the abstract mystery of God and came to the conclusion that to understand God, they needed to study His Creation.